Here’s How Johnny Depp Could Have Appeared in Birdman

In an interview last month, Birdman mastermind Alejandro González Iñárritu said that he started filming his Michael Keaton drama with an entirely different ending in the script.

“But in the middle of shooting, I knew it was a piece of shit,” Iñárritu, who directed and co-wrote the film, told IndieWire. Fortunately, while in production, the filmmaker and his co-writers came up with an ending that seemed “very fair” for the story and its characters. What of Birdman’s original ending, though?

During a segment on “The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith,” Birdman co-writer Alex Dinelaris revealed what that initial conclusion actually was.

“The other ending was that [Michael Keaton’s character] shoots himself
on the stage. The camera comes around to the audience and their
standing ovation. . .and the segue was back on to the stage with James
Lipton or Charlie Rose and Michael [Keaton] sitting across from him,
and he’s sort of reading the review. [Lipton or Rose] is saying, ‘Oh
my God, you got this tremendous review,’ and Michael is like, ‘Yeah.’

“And then the camera prowled
like it did the whole film, went backstage through the halls we’ve
seen the whole time, and we’d get to the dressing room where literally
Johnny Depp would be sitting, looking in the mirror, putting on his Riggan Thomson wig and then the poster of Pirates of the
Caribbean 5 would be in the back. In Jack Sparrow’s voice, the poster
asks Depp, ‘What the f— are we doing here, mate?’ and it was going
to be the satire of the endless loop of that.”

This ending would have been impossible to film though, because, as Dinelaris laughed, they “couldn’t get Johnny Depp or even the poster.”

Ultimately, the writers decided to end the film with Riggan in the hospital after he shoots himself onstage during his performance. He sees birds flying outside his room and climbs out onto the building’s ledge. When Riggan’s daughter (Emma Stone) returns, she notices that his hospital bed is empty and walks toward the window. She looks down, presumably expecting to see his body on the ground, but then looks upward, and smiles.

Iñárritu has said that he is “so happy that I changed” the ending to the above. “Now I feel very good about the ending. It feels very fair.”

Many awards voters seem to agree—the Birdman team won the best-screenplay Golden Globe last month and is up for the Academy Award in the category.